Many corporations, organizations, and governments have made net zero commitments, and most are leaning on voluntary carbon offsetting to achieve these climate goals. But how can we be sure that such carbon offsets demonstrate a real change in the atmosphere? And how can we approach offsetting in a way that gives rise to an actual net zero society?
Eli Mitchell-Larson is a climate researcher and PhD candidate at the University of Oxford and the corresponding author of The Oxford Principles for Net Zero Aligned Carbon Offsetting. He also serves as an advisor to Carbon Direct and is helping build a new carbon removal advocacy organization in Europe. On this episode of Reversing Climate Change, Eli joins Ross to walk us through Oxford’s four principles, explaining why the guidelines prioritize decarbonizing first and then negating emissions.
Eli describes why he advocates for a shift to carbon removal offsetting and long-lived storage, discussing why he believes nature-based solutions are crucial—but may not be appropriate for carbon markets. Listen in to understand the argument of why companies must support the development of net zero aligned offsetting (and what that might look like) and learn how you can get involved in Eli’s burgeoning advocacy organization that serves as a champion for carbon removal.
Connect with Ross
Subscribe to the show on Substack @ rosskenyon.com/subscribe.
I also write Carbon Removal Memes and curate Climate Workers Anonymous.
Resources
The Oxford Principles for Net Zero Aligned Carbon Offsetting 2020
Eli Mitchell-Larson on Twitter
CDR Advocacy’s Open Executive Director Role
George Monbiot’s 2006 Article on Carbon Offsets
United Nations Race to Zero Campaign
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon. I’m the creative editor at Nori’s Carbon Removal Marketplace. Today I have with me Eli Mitchell-Larson, researcher and PhD candidate at the University of Oxford and the corresponding author of the Oxford Offsetting Principles, advisor to Carbon Direct, and he is leading the scoping group for a new carbon removal advocacy organization in Europe, a parallel to Carbon 180. Welcome to the show, Eli. Thanks, Ross. Good to be here. So happy to have met you.
So happy to be engaging with your ideas. The Oxford Offsetting Principles made a big splash and I’ve been thinking about them quite a lot lately. So I’m happy to have a chance to dive in more fully here. How did you get involved in their composition? What led to them? And why you personally, Eli? How did your career end you up here? Thanks. Yeah, sure.
Eli Mitchell-Larson: So the OXR principles for net zero aligned carbon offsetting, which is a bit of a mouthful, but we like to belabor the title because it really is about that net zero alignment piece, not so much about the offsets themselves, was a document that was initiated by a Ben Caldecott at the University of Oxford. And his goal was really to bring people together around this issue because everybody is making net zero claims. I often think that we’ve just passed through the sort of honeymoon phase where everybody makes a net zero claim and says mission accomplished.
But now we’re starting to enter into How do we do that in a way that allows us to make the claim? I have achieved net zero emissions. It’s all about that claim. And so what Ben Caldecott and others did at Steve Smith, they brought together a group of academics at Oxford who covered a lot of different areas. So people who had deep experience on nature-based solutions like Yad Vinder. Dr. Malhi and Natalie Seddon, people that had more experience on the governance issues, the economic pieces, the sort of geophysics of climate change itself, bringing them all together and see if with such a diverse group of folks, we could come to a consensus around what does net zero aligned offsetting look like and how can we make that useful to all the people that are out there making net zero commitments?
In terms of me specifically, I started out in geology, geophysics, and paleoclimates, but I ended up going into the private sector and doing first some impact investing at New Island Capital, and then I co-ran a startup in Nepal doing off-grid solar, and I came to the kind So I was brought in to consult for something called the Jonathan Colton Crews. To actually, you know, help them come up with a carbon plan. And that’s when I really had to dive deep into what are carbon offsets, you know, all the way back to George Monbiot’s 2006 piece around carbon offsets being indulgences and really just tracing the history of how that all came about.
And then it was really my time at Oxford working with Professor Miles Allen and others to really understand these issues from an atmospheric standpoint and from the standpoint of what the planet actually needs. How can we make carbon offsetting credible?
Ross Kenyon: I think we’ve had more critics of offsetting on than people who think that they can be made credible. So I think this is going to be a really important, fascinating discussion.
Eli Mitchell-Larson: I like to say there’s that Venn diagram where you’ve got the circle of people who want carbon markets, voluntary carbon offsetting to explode and scale. And you’ve got the circle of people that are critics of the voluntary carbon market. And I think I would actually sit at the overlap of the two. I think there’s problems with the market, but I think we can save it. We can make it work. Does everyone like and trust you as the arbiter? Does everyone hate you? Well, I definitely wouldn’t consider myself the arbiter.
I’m definitely trying to be as, I guess, diplomatic as I can be. And all of us are to make sure that we’re here to kind of make carbon offsetting a means of actually achieving real climate outcomes and calling it like it is. There’s instances where maybe carbon offsetting isn’t the right mechanism to support certain practices. And there’s certainly room for all solutions. And we’ll talk about that more later in the conversation. Definitely.
Ross Kenyon: Well, since you made such a point of framing this discussion around net zero, I think it might be most productive to start there. What exactly is a net zero commitment? What are companies trying to lock themselves into right now? Excellent question. You’re right.
Eli Mitchell-Larson: So, I mean, I think the useful thing is that the concept of net zero essentially has a geophysical definition, or at least it has a definition in the IPCC that we can all, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, that we can all agree on. And that is a balance of sources and sinks. So a balance of emissions, essentially with carbon removal. So the nice thing about net zero is that it encompasses a lot of sort of different end states. You can be net zero And so when companies or entities, non-state actors are committing to net zero, what they’re doing is they are basically putting themselves in line with what we know has to happen to stop climate change.
Because as a cumulative pollutant, CO2 is just going to keep building up and building up. And warming will continue until we reach net zero. And net zero can only be achieved when many, many, and eventually all Sub-entities, countries, cities, and companies themselves are net zero, or at least collectively are net zero.
Ross Kenyon: Is there some difference between maybe a decade or more ago, people were talking about being carbon neutral or climate neutral? What’s the relationship between all of these? A lot of it just ends like corporate speak, and it’s hard to know which one is which and what it actually refers to.
Eli Mitchell-Larson: I think that’s right. There’s still some ambiguity around that. There’s an effort known as the, I think it’s the United Nations Climate Champions. And Thomas Hale at Oxford has been really instrumental in leading this effort called the Race to Zero Criteria. And the idea there is, you know, We love lexicons. How can we make sure as academics that these individual terms are well-defined? And that was really around net zero. So the idea with the race to zero criteria is let’s have an umbrella set of criteria that can be applied to all the other efforts like The science-based targets initiative or other people who are opining on what net zero means.
Let’s make sure they’re all aligned with this one thing. So I think that carbon neutral, I was surprised to learn that I think it basically means the same thing. I think it basically also refers to a balance. There’s some, I think, usage of that term that might mean, I think, colloquially, net zero probably means balancing emissions with removals, whereas carbon neutral, perhaps just because it’s an older and legacy term, Term seems to be a slightly less ambitious claim that often refers to, well, you use offsets, you use avoided emission offsets specifically in order to achieve carbon neutrality.
So it seems like net zero is a more ambitious claim, but there’s still some ambiguity around what those specific things mean. And I think that’s frustrating for corporates. But the good news is net zero has a definition and we can be very confident of that.
Ross Kenyon: I want to talk a little bit about that, yeah, the famous George Monbiot indulgences offsets comparison, which if you’re talking about removals, that sounds like an indulgence that might work and be okay. If it’s just avoided emissions or some sort of other type of offset, I can see why that would rub people the wrong way and not be as accurate. But could you say that carbon removal under net zero might be indulgences that actually work? Is that appropriate?
Eli Mitchell-Larson: Yeah. It’s fascinating. I wish I could remember who to credit this next piece to, because what I really liked about one of the responses to the Monbiot piece was basically, you know, well, actually, if you believe that the Catholic Church does have a monopoly on the absolution of sin, and if they’re capable of it, And I think the point that Monbiot was making, or one of the many points he was making, and it’s interesting how so many of his critiques of offsetting I’ve spoken with him and tried to sort of see if his views have shifted on that.
And I think, you know, he really sticking to his guns, because a lot of what he says, you know, is still valid in some sense. You’re paying to get out of something, right? And that’s the idea that every offset, every carbon credit, it’s a two-sided transaction. We always focus on one end of it. One end of the transaction is money moves from someone that has money to some carbon project, often in the developing world. And that’s almost invariably a good thing. There’s obviously concerns around that in some instances, how that money is spent.
But that’s the side of the transaction we focus on. The other end of the transaction, the offset buyer, the person who ends up with the carbon credit, they now have the opportunity to not abate. They get to basically forego reducing their emissions by one ton in exchange for getting this carbon credit. If you’re paying for something that doesn’t actually have that carbon benefit, then you’re actually generating more emissions than had you done nothing and not bought the offset. Now, your point about carbon removals being kind of the ultra effective indulgence.
I think it’s really that actually avoided emissions or emission reductions. So sort of the one side of the coin and carbon removal. Both of these techniques are capable of generating a carbon credit that is legitimate. It’s just that you need to prove something called additionality, right? You need to actually prove that but for the purchase of the carbon credit, the mitigating action, the reduction of carbon or the removal of carbon would never have happened. And I think really what we’re saying when we’re saying that removals are superior, I mean, first of all, removals are the only thing you can use to balance the residual emissions in the end state when you’re at net zero.
But in the lead up to that, avoided emissions or emission reductions are a bit problematic because it’s just really hard to prove additionality. Also permanence and sort of other criteria that you would evaluate have issues too. But I think additionality specifically, and that’s why even in advance of net zero, which is kind of the drop dead date when we need to be removing everything we put up, even in advance of that, there’s plenty of reasons to be skeptical of avoided emission and emission reduction offsets. And so I think your point does stand.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, that’s good. I like it when my points stand. That’s always nice. I’m trying to think about the, maybe I’m overdoing this comparison, but I think what people don’t like the indulgence aspect of it either, it’s because it’s not supposed to allow you to commit additional sins, I think. So if you buy the Catholic Church’s case on indulgences or the absolution of sins, I don’t think, except maybe in the case of going to war, I think that you can be absolved ahead of time, but you can’t say like, I’m going to cheat on my wife tomorrow.
Here’s some money. Yeah, it’s funny.
Eli Mitchell-Larson: Ex-post being where the sequestration of the action has already taken place. So maybe there’s some analogy there. I bet we could write something.
Ross Kenyon: I think forgiveness has to be ex-post. I think you can’t say I’m going to sin and be forgiven ahead of time. So I know ex-ante offsets are also additionally controversial, right? That’s like a big fight’s happened over there.
Eli Mitchell-Larson: That’s right. I think a lot of people would say, you know, it’s important that if you’re going to have some lead time between when you pay for the carbon sequestration and when it actually takes place, that lead time needs to be fairly short because obviously the longer it goes, the more uncertainty there is. And I think there’s some great precedents we can take from financial markets and also project finance for wind and solar, where you can contract these things and you can reduce the risk of non-performance. In other words, reduce the risk that the person from whom you’re buying an ex-anti-carbon credit won’t deliver that credit.
Let’s just get delivery of the credits only as they’re generated, almost like vesting into a stock. Would it be helpful to kind of go into the Oxford principles themselves? I know you’ve talked about them in the past on the program, but whatever would be useful you think to the listeners and to you.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think this is a nice place to break in because otherwise we’ll just dance all around the so, so many complex issues that surround this entire discussion. So of the four Oxford offsetting principles, and we’re going to work our way through all of these. The first one is cut emissions, use high quality offsets and regularly revise offsetting strategy as best practice evolves. So this sounds like something we say at Nori is emit less and remove the rest. But why have a decarbonization first strategy and then negate your emissions after that?
Why can’t someone just do business as usual and use credible carbon removals and then get net zero that way? What’s wrong with that?
Eli Mitchell-Larson: Great question. And I love the mitigation hierarchy you alluded to from Nori. And just a note to our listeners, there are only four principles. So this won’t be a sort of 99 or 95 theses, whatever it was that Martin Luther had. Don’t be putting nails in my door. Don’t be doing that. But yeah, there’s four principles. And principle one, let’s take the three components in turn. So the idea of cut emissions. I mean, this is really simple stuff. And this goes back to this idea of a mitigation hierarchy.
And I think the easiest way for me to think about it is, we’ve got some subset of a For example, for a long time, we’ve just stubbornly included steel production in there. And certainly the process emissions from, you know, That’s something that, you know, it’s really difficult to get rid of. It’s fundamental for the process, not even an emission from the fuel, but like, that’s an example of a big chunk of emissions that we’ve always considered hard or impossible to abate. We’re going to need CCS or something.
Well, actually there’s been a lot We have talk and progress around using blue and green hydrogen or ammonia, other sort of green fuels to do that same process. So our definition of what hard to abate is, is always changing. But if we take it at any given point, if your organization, your country, your city, your company Some portion of its emissions, often it’s in the range of 15 to 30%. That’s sort of economy or global wide, right? If you include, if you add up cement, steel, maritime transport, long haul aviation, agriculture, you know, these buckets, whatever those That’s probably what it’s appropriate to offset.
So we’re kind of beyond this point where it’s really permissible or appropriate to be offsetting your scope one emissions, your scope two emissions. And just to cover what those are, scope one emissions, right? The direct stuff coming out of your smokestack, if you will, or from your factory scope two emissions being the emissions associated with your energy procurement, which often you can address through renewable energy credits, although there are some issues there. Does that actually advance decarbonization of the grid? Maybe, maybe not. So it’s really these scope three or sort of indirect emissions that are typically the ones that are most readily offsetable, unless of course, for some organizations, their scope one emissions are hard to abate.
If you’re a cement factory, you don’t have a lot of options other than carbon capture and storage. And so I think that’s kind of a good way, a good rule of thumb to figure out what you should be offsetting. Now, your question is basically, you’re challenging that and saying, well, why bother? And I think that’s In a sense, true. If you had extremely high quality removal, if you had extremely high durability of storage, removing carbon from the air with very low energy penalty, storing it in a geological formation in perpetuity, then why not?
I think absolutely, because the reality is the cost of doing that, at least right now, is so high, $700 a ton. Let’s say it got down to $100 a ton. Even so, if everybody were holding themselves accountable to offset all of their scope one and two emissions with that expensive solution, that would have the effect of a carbon price and it would force them to mitigate because they would be saying, why are we paying so much money? Gosh darn money to address these scope one emissions when we could just eliminate them.
Most people’s cost of abatement will be lower, not necessarily. But I think the bigger question is, how long can we afford to keep filling up carbon stocks? And that’s a nice way to think about what the earth can do for us, I guess. I mean, we’re relying heavily on The biosphere and the lithosphere, meaning the sort of layer of geology, the subsurface. And I think we have a good sense of how big those carbon stocks are and how much headroom they have, how much more carbon can we stuff in there?
And I think there’s been some good work to think about that in terms of terrestrial carbon storage, right? How much carbon can be put in soils and in vegetation and there’s also some sense of how much carbon we can put into geological storage. It’s orders of magnitude bigger, in fact, than the terrestrial storage. And so the real answer to your question is, well, sure, why not? Somebody can keep buying high quality removal for all their emissions. It’s just We’re going to eventually fill up these stocks that the earth has essentially provided for us, these sinks.
When we do so, we’re out of luck. We need to be thinking about moving towards absolute zero. I often say the race to net zero, that’s just a finish line that immediately starts a new race to absolute zero. And that sort of global race is going to repeat itself within many organizations, right? They might achieve net zero or at least net zero aligned offsetting before they achieve anything close to absolute zero emissions, but they still need to be thinking about that. And that’s what I think Science Based Targets has been really helpful at doing is saying, we got to focus on what that actual emission reductions plan is.
And that’s key to principle one.
Ross Kenyon: I think the headroom case for decarbonizing first and negating emissions second is really intriguing. I hardly ever hear anyone make it though. And I think it’s because I’m speculating here and you can tell me if this is wrong in your opinion, but that I don’t I don’t think there’s a lot of faith in offsetting as a strategy. I feel most people think it’s prone to some cases of abuse or greenwashing. And rather than them putting, you know, a $700 ton into geological sequestration, it’ll be some dubious $3 buck 50 sort of like avoided deforestation thing.
And you’re like, they’re going to claim it and they’re going to shout it from the rooftops and no one’s going to call them on it in a meaningful way. Am I reading too much into that?
Eli Mitchell-Larson: No, it’s a good point. I mean, principle one here where we’re saying use high quality offsets, we’re relying very heavily on those four words, use high quality offsets, because the reality is it’s a bit of a wake up call that the voluntary carbon market, meaning the collection of carbon credits that are available, The state of the voluntary carbon market is not good. It’s quite dire, in fact. I mean, so many of the credits that you would go out and buy right now don’t meet the minimum criteria that would allow you to say that they’re high quality offsets.
That’s this question about addition. Would the carbon benefit have occurred but for your purchase? Is the carbon stored permanently? Is the carbon benefit achieved in perpetuity? Are you ensuring that you haven’t had any sort of secondary unintended consequences on, well, And I think it’s really important to see what’s avoided emissions and what’s carbon removal. And we’ll get to that in a minute when we talk about principle two, which is, you know, we’ve got to be And I think that’s why we have an uphill battle, but it’s a battle worth fighting to actually regain trust and build credibility.
And that requires that people... Be honest and open and transparent about the data they’re collecting. There need to also be ex-post analyses. In other words, retrospective analyses. Barbara Haya at Berkeley is a really prominent person that’s been doing excellent work on that front to basically say, here’s a carbon market. Here’s a specific protocol that was used to generate credits. Did it do what it said it was going to do? And if not, why not? How can we tweak the protocol and improve it so that the carbon credits that are getting approved are actually additional, actually doing something for the atmosphere.
So that’s this piece about maintaining transparency. But yeah, what’s out there is not great. And I think Having a higher threshold for what we accept as net zero aligned, right? You mentioned proclaiming it from the rooftops. That is what we want to do. We want to declare victory. We want to say, I am net zero. We can’t do that. That’s the entire purpose of the Oxford principles was to set out a perspective for what you need to do in order to allow yourself to shout from the rooftops.
And we’re going to talk about that in a minute with principles two and three. It’s got to be this shift to removals and long-lived storage, and it’s got to be ultra high quality offsets. Then you can credibly say, you know, I’m on a journey to net zero, right? We’re using offsets in a net zero aligned way.
Ross Kenyon: Great. Thank you. Making my job easy. Why don’t you just take us into the second principle here? Shift to carbon removal offsetting. Why do that? Why not avoided emissions? What is your motivation for this section?
Eli Mitchell-Larson: Sure. And I guess I’ll just add one little thing on principle one, which kind of segmas in, which is this idea of maintaining transparency. And that means you as a company, as a buyer of offsets are being extremely transparent about what types of offsets you buy. And one of the key figures that we’ve gotten a lot of feedback on from the Oxford principles is this... Carbon Credit Taxonomy. So it’s a figure in the principles that gives you a flow chart that divides up the different carbon credit types.
And there’s really just five that we were able to identify and we can actually put all the different carbon projects into those different buckets. We say be transparent about what offsets you’re buying. What we mean is be clear about what percentage of your offsets come from which bucket so that you can be in compliance with principle two, which says you must shift your offsets towards carbon removal. So there’s this concept that every carbon credit, every carbon offset is either an emission reduction, sometimes referred to as an avoided emission, or it is a carbon removal.
The former obviously requiring a baseline and sort of a counterfactual assessment of what the world would have been if you have to do that same counterfactual analysis for carbon removal as well. It’s just that it’s a lot easier because the baseline was doing nothing. The action is to actually take carbon out of the air and store it someplace. That’s going to be really important. And I think when we talk about principle three is this piece about storage. You have to be storing the carbon somewhere.
But anyway, principle two says you must shift towards carbon removal. And this gets back to what you brought up very early in the conversation. What is net zero? Net zero is when you balance any remaining emissions with removals. And so that’s the end state. There’s no other end state other than one in which everybody who’s still buying carbon credits is buying all carbon removal credits. Now, does that transition have to happen tomorrow? I mean, it would be great if it could, but as we’ll get into, the supply of removals is quite scarce.
And also, a lot of carbon credits are ambiguously neither fully avoided emissions. But the key here is that transparency. So you’re actually publishing and sharing to your stakeholders what the breakdown of your offsets are. And that way, any sort of watchdogs can actually observe and hold you accountable and say, you’re making progress, but not fast enough. If organizations like Microsoft that we work with, one of our clients at Carbon Direct, they’ve basically gone straight to 100% removals. And that’s been really challenging, but really rewarding also to sort of prove that’s possible.
Ross Kenyon: And the point behind the second principle is equivalence here being set up between if you mobilize a ton of carbon dioxide, you are obligated to pull it out of the atmosphere and store it somewhere. You can’t just avoid future emissions. You have to actually remove in a very clear demonstrable way. Is that what is trying to be done here in this section?
Eli Mitchell-Larson: Yeah, exactly. It’s basically saying you can avoid emissions or pay someone else to reduce their emissions in advance of net zero. But once you get to net zero, by definition, that means globally, we’re removing just as much carbon as we are emitting. So that’s sort of the physical balance that needs to be achieved. Now, in that global net zero state, It is possible that some, well, it’s actually certain that some people will be gross positive emitters and other people will be net negative emitters and those on the whole will balance out.
So there might be a form of aviation that still has some emissions that need to be addressed by removals on the ground. There may be some agricultural processes that we choose to continue in the same way and we counteract them with commensurate storage of carbon somewhere else. Some avoided emission carbon credits don’t seem to involve the apparent storage of carbon. And that would be something like methane or N2O destruction. It’s a bit mysterious. You kind of destroy the pollutant. Where is the carbon being stored?
Well, it’s not really being stored, except perhaps in this sort of uncombusted fossil fuel that you didn’t buy in the case of clean cookstoves, which is a bit of a weird idea. A weird thing to wrap your head around, but all the other carbon credits do involve carbon storage. And this is where we have this two-by-two matrix. On one axis, you can ask, is the carbon credit removing carbon from the atmosphere or is it avoiding emissions to the atmosphere? On the other axis of this matrix, you can ask, is the place where you’re putting the carbon a very, very safe place with a low risk of reversal or a less safe place with a higher physical risk of reversal?
Both of those buckets have value. And actually, really, it’s a spectrum, right? It’s a spectrum of different degrees of risk and permanence. But I think that’s what we’re trying to identify is there’s this matrix and we need to be shifting towards the removal side because that’s the only way we can actually balance remaining emissions. And principle three, which we’ll talk about soon, we need to be shifting towards that long-lived storage, that low-risk storage.
Ross Kenyon: I think we should go there now. Principle three is shift to long-lived storage, which is something that we spend a lot of time thinking about at Nori. Permanence is obviously very important. You definitely don’t want leakage. There are also limits to how much you can reasonably offer in terms of permanence to a prospective buyer of negative emissions when they’re buying from you. What should we be doing with permanence? We think it’s important. We don’t want leakage, but we also don’t want to make it impossible for anything in the ecosphere to be considered carbon removal.
I think there’s a lot of important scale. It’s cheap right now. I think there’s a lot of interesting work being done to We want to make carbon removal in the natural environment more and more productive and trustworthy. But if all you care about is permanence and maybe Stripe’s thousand year permanence is a good example of this, does that rule out the ecosphere and is that good or bad? How should we be thinking about permanence? No small questions.
Eli Mitchell-Larson: No. Well, I mean, this point about does that rule out the nature-based solutions? Absolutely not. And I think the first point I’ll make there is that we need to be maximally deploying nature-based solutions no matter what, particularly when they have co-benefits around ecosystem restoration and biodiversity. So I think this is some really important work that Natalie Seddon and Steve Smith, others have done to kind of talk about How do we think about the role of nature in solving our climate goals, but also our biodiversity goals and all these other goals we may have?
I mentioned earlier that an offset is a two-sided transaction. So we don’t have to necessarily fund all of these conservation outcomes using a carbon credit. As soon as we choose to use a carbon credit, we have to remember that requires that we hold the carbon benefit that we’re claiming is happening to a very high standard. If the We’re going for net zero aligned offsetting, which we are because we’re talking about the principles. Most people want to do things the right way.
Ross Kenyon: Is what you’re maybe trying to get at here that carbon removal in the natural world or nature-based solutions are important, but perhaps they are not as appropriate for a carbon market or for carbon financial assets to be utilized? Is that sort of what you’re driving at? Exactly.
Eli Mitchell-Larson: Exactly. I mean, it’s possible to support these outcomes in their own right. And that’s a piece that we talk about in principle four, where it’s important to value the benefits that these projects provide in and of themselves, rather than tying everything to a carbon benefit first and having What we refer to as a co-benefit in a lot of cases with nature-based solutions, particularly project-based red, right? Avoided deforestation, where it’s very difficult to determine additionality. It’s very difficult to control for indirect carbon leakage. By that, I don’t mean And physical reversal of the carbon.
I mean, this fact that it’s a bit of a waterbed. You store carbon in one location, but you haven’t changed fundamental demand for food and fiber. Somebody is gonna grow that palm oil somewhere else. So that issue of the carbon basically being reshuffled around And then third and finally, this permanence, right? Like you mentioned, how do we think about permanence? I think it’s unreasonable to always think about permanence as wherever you physically stored the carbon, that specific parcel We can never say that a given acre of forest or a given plot of farmland that Nori works with, we can never say that’s going to stay stored in perpetuity.
Inevitably, Pests, disease, natural disasters, changes in management, human intervention, whether legal or illegal, something will happen at some point to cause the physical re-release or reversal that carbon. And that’s okay. That’s just what we have to accept for that kind of solution. So that’s why I prefer to talk about the risk of reversal. When you put lots of carbon in terrestrial stuff, it sinks. When you sort of add more and more carbon to soils and vegetation, what you have to recognize you’re doing is you’re actually sort of stacking up risk.
You’re putting more and more of that carbon at risk because remember what you’re doing. We’re always moving carbon from one sphere to another. We’ve got the lithosphere, all the subsurface. We’ve got, let’s call it the anthroposphere, the place where we live and all of our oil tanks and our places where we store carbon. And then we’ve got the biosphere and also the oceans and the atmosphere. But essentially, when we offset fossil emissions... We are actively converting fossil CO2 from the lithosphere into terrestrial carbon in the biosphere.
And that’s a riskier place for it to be. Now that’s okay, but we just have to recognize that, that if the biosphere flips from being a net sink to being a net source, and there’s a lot of work that’s shown that even in response to 1.5 degrees of warming globally, which at this rate, it’s looking like it will be difficult to avoid, That will have impacts on the biosphere, right? That’s going to kick into gear various amplifying effects. This is this ecosystem climate response. Some of these feedback loops that aren’t necessarily, aren’t yet, I should say, incorporated into the carbon budgets.
And so if that’s the case, If these places where we’ve stored carbon start to release it en masse, who’s responsible for that? The person who paid for the storage in the first place is a company that may or may not even exist anymore. And if it’s been this hard for us to hold fossil fuel companies and others accountable for their past contributions to climate change, I don’t see how it’s going to get any easier to hold a company who is trying to do the right thing, let’s be honest, accountable for a leakage event.
No company wants that on their balance sheet. That’s why these protocols have in place these limits to permanence. You probably know more about this than I do, especially with soil carbon, where you have these 100-year guardrails in the California carbon market where you say, Listen, if you can guarantee this for 100 years, that’s good enough for our purposes. What I want to say on permanence is that it’s really about recognizing that the only enduring sustainable end state, the only sort of sustainable net zero, and by that I mean a net zero state that you can keep going in perpetuity, is one in which you’re putting the carbon in a safe place.
And you’re doing so commensurate with whatever you’re emitting. And this is where this idea of sort of like for like, so matching terrestrial carbon, carbon emissions that come from soils, that come from vegetation with storage in those same or similar soils and vegetation and matching geosphere, fossil carbon extraction from under the ground with geological storage of CO2. We think that’s a really useful framing because that allows you to basically match like for like.
Ross Kenyon: That’s fascinating. So if you’re an oil and gas major, you’re expected to fund Climb Works or something like that, and you’re actually sending the captured CO2 back into a geological storage environment.
Eli Mitchell-Larson: Yes, absolutely. I think holding the oil and gas companies accountable and basically harnessing this margin that they’re making when they take, you know, essentially mineral wealth out of the ground and turn it into money. There’s a big margin that’s taken out, and actually a lot of it is royalties and taxes, but what if we held the extractors of fossil carbon responsible for putting carbon back into the ground equivalent with what they dug up? It basically says, let’s leave the most expensive stuff to the people who are most actively making use of fossil carbon, and let’s leave the cheapest stuff, like avoided deforestation, To the emissions that really have no one to speak for them.
So these emissions that are going to sort of start burping out of the biosphere in a decade or so, let’s say. You know, who’s responsible for those? It’s really hard. We’re not good as a species at solving this collective action issue. And so if we don’t know who’s responsible for those, it’s safer to match those against the sort of low hanging fruit and say, you know, while we have you, while we have your attention, fossil fuel companies, while you’re still making money, while we’re still using fossil fuels at all, let’s take advantage of that.
And let’s make sure that you are contributing to storing initially small, but growing Fraction of the carbon. And this is a policy proposal from Miles Allen that’s referred to as the carbon take back obligation. This is something we’ve been working on. We can add the link in the show notes, but it’s essentially a policy that would Make companies do exactly that. Say anybody who’s digging up carbon or bringing carbon into a given region is responsible for cleaning it up at the wellhead, at the beginning of the process.
And that doesn’t let the emitters downstream off the hook, but it actually forces the extractors to have what we call extended producer responsibility. The same way producers of paper packaging or car tires have to pay for the costs that their product creates. Why would we treat oil and gas products any differently?
Ross Kenyon: No, I think carbon take back obligations require a separate show entirely because there’s so much there too. Are you also saying though that if you’re involved in agricultural emissions, then you should focus on soil sequestration or land-based mechanisms for carbon removal or is that an inappropriate application?
Eli Mitchell-Larson: I think perhaps that could be the conclusion, but I think we want to keep it with the Oxford principles, we want to keep it high level and say, look, we can’t, you know, all we can really say with confidence is you’ve got to shift towards removals and you’ve got to shift towards long live storage. Now, how fast you We need to make this stuff regulated and we need to make this stuff mandatory. And in the interim, because it’s a voluntary carbon market, there’s only so much we can ask.
I think what we have to do is hold companies accountable and say, you know, you’re saying you’re aligned with the Oxford Ossetian Principles, but the rate with which you’re shifting towards removals and long-lossers. And that’s probably the most we can ask. Now, there is this point about matching like for like, and I think that’s right that, you know, we should be always cognizant of the transformation we’re making when we’re moving carbon from the lithosphere into the biosphere or vice versa. Right now, we’re doing a lot of converting fossil fuels into trees.
And we can only do that for so long. And really, to my point earlier, we should get the folks who are most able to pay for the more permanent storage, which we know we’re going to have to do eventually anyways. It’s just a question of who do we hold responsible for doing it and when. Well, Eli, since I have you here, can I ask you for some free business advice? Let’s see if I have anything to offer.
Ross Kenyon: With soil sequestration, the farmers that we work with, we only require 10 year contracts for permanence. And there’s so much that goes into these permanence discussions because as you noted in other markets where a hundred years is the norm, that’s off putting to a number of farmers Farmers and Growers because that’s ultimately an obligation that will fall on their grandchildren or maybe even great-grandchildren. And who knows what is going to happen to their farming practices in that time. It’s scary to lock yourself into a deal like that.
We’ve gone for something shorter thinking that once that land is converted, it is more naturally fertile and valuable. And so there is some inertia we’re hoping plays out and that it remains that way. But we tell buyers of these NRTs nor removal tonnes, we say we can only Definitely specify for this amount of time. Beyond that, if you need greater permanence than that, you either need to buy more or something differently. Ultimately, Nori is not a soil or ag company. We want to be involved in carbon removals broadly and are thinking about permanence and if and how these assets are fungible against each other in terms of permanence.
I’ll put a pin in that. I’ll ask that one to you next. But how should we be approaching soil? Is this an okay way to think of it?
Eli Mitchell-Larson: I think you’re absolutely right that you can’t get somebody to sign on to a hundred year agreement. That’s unreasonable and it wouldn’t make sense. But the reality with a lot of regenerative agriculture and soil carbon project types, as I understand it, is you’re basically paying for a So it’s probably most accurate to think of in this sort of ton year framing, as in you’re paying to keep one ton of carbon in the ground for one year. That’s what you’re paying for. I think that’s an interesting model that Zach Parisa from Sylvia Terra has pioneered.
It’s a difficult thing to wrap your head around. I’ve even struggled too because I think it doesn’t really fit into this framework. As a result, it would only be appropriate to have those short-lived carbon storage methods in the interim as a transition towards more permanent removals. Now, again, back to my point about there are plenty of reasons to be doing regenerative agriculture, to be storing carbons in soils and enhancing our soils, and we should be doing those. There’s no reason why there can’t be additional claims that buyers of credits would make.
If I wanted to have a net zero commitment and A net positive impact on soil regeneration. I could do that. And then I could go out and fund regenerative agriculture on its own merit, not asking for any sort of carbon credit in return. So we have to think about models like that because that might be an additional way to fund that behavior. But it’s definitely difficult. And I understand because we need to be doing these things. And yet they don’t fit neatly into what we know needs to happen from a geophysical standpoint in terms of actually managing the carbon that’s coming out and the carbon that’s going back in.
Ross Kenyon: I have this idea, and feel free to dunk on me if you think I’ve made a wrong turn, that even if... Sort of the worst case here. The worst case beyond premature leakage for soil carbon is that it only lasts for 10 years and then the land is plowed up and turned into a subdivision or something like that. I think even buying us additional time of Right. Right. Right.
Eli Mitchell-Larson: I think you’re right that it has value, and the big question is how much value. There is a way of quantitatively comparing the value of permanent storage to the value of temporary storage, and it involves invoking a discount rate. It involves the terrifying prospect of deciding the degree to which we value future generations less than current generations. With that, you are capable of making those comparisons. I think It definitely has value. And in the Oxford principles framing, what we’re saying is, you know, it’s important to keep escalating that percentage of removals that you’re buying and that percentage of long lived or low risk storage that you’re putting carbon into.
And as long as you’re on that quadratically increasing pathway all the way to 100% by 2045, because as I think we’ll see with the new IPCC report, It’s not 2050 anymore to get to net zero for 1.5. It’s probably something more like 2045. So by the time we get to 2045, mid-century, we’ve really got to be storing carbon permanently. We’ve got to be removing it from the air rather than the accounting element of paying others to avoid. So it does have value, but it’s only part of the transition.
It plays a role, and we can’t expect organizations to only rely on that. They need to show in good faith that they’re scaling up those other solutions at the same time.
Ross Kenyon: Indeed. And this tonnier thing you bring up too, we have been thinking a lot about that as well, because we think if permanence is the most important factor about a given carbon removal, sort of being able to compare against the amount of permanence that can reasonably be guaranteed allows for some fungibility between these different types of carbon removals, I think. I mean, that’s ignoring all the co-benefits and other reasons. Someone might prefer to support blue carbon or something else for their own reasons. But I also have this worry that it already took this amount of time to educate policymakers and buyers of offsets and negative emissions to think in terms of tonnes.
But now you have to add a temporal dimension to every asset too. It kind of hurts my brain to think about it. And I work on this on a daily basis. So is it worth the cost to re-educate consumers and policymakers about thinking in terms of 10 years rather than tonnes? Is it more trouble than it’s worth? Or is that the best way that we should go?
Eli Mitchell-Larson: I would not embark on that project. I would keep it rooted in the race to zero criteria for what net zero means, things like the Oxford Principles, other guidance that says, what does net zero aligned offsetting look like? It looks like using very high quality offsets that have a high certainty of carbon benefit. It looks like shifting your carbon offsetting practices towards removals. It looks like shifting your practices towards long-lived storage, eventually achieving 100%. You got to do that, right? But that’s only a portion.
That’s the sort of fraction that you’re escalating. There’s some leeway perhaps in what else you’re buying. And maybe that’s where carbon credits that offer a carbon benefit, but one that has less certainty or one that lasts for a short amount of time. I think another way to think about it is we should think about carbon stocks and sinks as things that people need to steward. And so if you put carbon in the soil... And it comes back out. Well, someone should be responsible for when that carbon comes back out.
It’s like, think about the example of a lot of the reforestation that Shell is doing in Southeast Asia, where they’ll buy up a degraded palm oil plantation. Well, 20 years ago, that palm oil plantation was a tropical forest and it was destroyed and the carbon was released. Who was responsible for that? When they go back and reforest that plot, They want to sell you a carbon credit that says when you pump their fuel out of the pump, the petrol station, depending on which country you live in, you are doing so with carbon neutral gas.
But they’re basically matching that reforestation, that carbon sequestration with this fossil carbon, when in fact, you could argue it should go towards counteracting the original deforestation that took place 20 years ago. And so similarly, if you pile up carbon in a soil carbon sink, And then it gets re-released. Someone should be responsible for cleaning up that mess. You should have to store an equivalent amount of carbon to what was leaked out. And I think this can be accomplished with jurisdictional-based programs that cover not just an individual project.
But many, many projects where you say, you know, on the whole, we’ve got to make sure that the carbon stock retains its value and just keeps escalating up and up and up. And if we ever have a shortfall, maybe there’s a, maybe there’s a buffer pool that, that kicks in, but even better, there’s somebody who’s on the hook to actually go out and let’s say top up the carbon storage back to the value that it’s supposed to be at.
Ross Kenyon: Hmm. So the, I’m still just thinking about this, this tonnier thing a bit then. So it sounds like if, We shouldn’t try to re-educate people in terms of the ton year. And we also accept that a ton is not a ton is not a ton. So then are we giving up the dream of fungibility? Is that maybe a hurdle? Do you think that we should no longer try to make carbon removals somewhat equivalent in this way?
Eli Mitchell-Larson: Yeah, I think what we need to be focusing on is honesty and credibility around carbon benefits. And at this stage, we’re facing a market that’s a voluntary carbon market where maybe 80% of the credits are renewable energy and avoided deforestation. And these carbon project types that really just frankly can’t demonstrate that they really did anything in the atmosphere to a high degree of certainty. So we’re starting from a very low level. So I think the battles to fight now Are to tighten the rules so that we actually have to demonstrate real changes in the atmosphere due to the carbon project, actual carbon benefits.
And those are the battles to be fighting. I think introducing ton years is possible. I think we just have to recognize that the simplest formulation here is to basically say one out, one in. If you’re taking carbon out of a stock, which is what you’re doing whenever you dig up some fossil fuels, you’ve got to put carbon back in. And if we actually have those physical flows matched and we can ensure that, I mean, there’s a huge role for soil carbon there because there’s plenty of carbon Belching out of soils all over the world at any given time.
And so why don’t we match that physical outflow with physical inflow, adding carbon to similar stocks? So I think that physical balance is really important because the more we abstract away from that with these credits, we come into more danger around creating situations where there’s not fungibility. A ton is not a ton, right? Frankly, carbon credits are extremely different. They’re quite heterogeneous. And I think that’s what we tried to do with the Oxford Principles taxonomy is say, there’s fundamentally different buckets of carbon projects, and they have different roles to play.
And companies need to be clear about what they’re buying. They need to make sure that they’re on the right trajectory. They need to publicize that and share that. It’s maybe not the most direct answer to your question because I think there’s a lot we need to educate and assist on when it comes to high quality offsetting. Because if somebody just goes out to the market and they just buy whatever they see first, it’s probably not going to be good. And are they even going to know that?
So I applaud the work of a lot of journalists that I’ve seen who are writing these, frankly, almost exposés where they sort of say, look at this carbon project, like Whether you’re a scientist or a layperson, does this hold water? It clearly doesn’t. Common sense can go a long way if you really shine a light on some of these practices and people say, you know what, this is just not legitimate, clearly. It needs to be tightened.
Ross Kenyon: Well, how about you take us to this fourth principle, support the development of net zero aligned offsetting. How might that proceed? Right.
Eli Mitchell-Larson: So fourth and final. Yeah, this is really saying, in addition to making these transitions in your offsetting portfolio, it’s important that you as a credible actor, as a net zero aligned actor are actually pushing offsetting as a practice in the right direction. This mostly comes in the form of setting up long-term agreements. So we touched on this a bit earlier, but actually So you can actually be very supportive to some of these nascent earlier stage technologies by pooling demand with With other buyers and actually engaging in one of these long-term offtake agreements.
There’s also this idea around forming alliances with your industry, whether you’re a group of lawyers or a group of universities or a group of cement producers who have kind of common problems, frankly, and maybe common solutions. You have a similar mix of emissions and you can pull together and actually maybe have strength in numbers and maybe have principles across your industry that you can decide on together. And then there’s this idea around supporting the preservation of nature and restoration in its own right. And we talked about this earlier, where part of participating in a net zero aligned trajectory is making sure that all of these different The offsets you’re using are actually producing a tangible effect on the atmosphere.
They’re increasingly only removals and they’re increasingly only long-lived emissions. Now, that is going to start to limit the degree to which some companies in the late 2020s, 2030s, 2040s can rely on some nature-based solutions. But again, that’s no reason not to continue to support those solutions. In other words, the peak amount of land under agricultural management, we start to shrink that, whether that’s through more efficient production or changes in diets that free up land. We’re going to start to, we hope, have free land that we can use to free from a carbon standpoint, right?
Not necessarily free. Free land to store carbon on, to allow ecosystems to flourish, all of this. And we have to make sure that we do that, even if it’s no longer necessarily part of, or as explicitly part of a carbon market as before.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. Well, what do you think has changed since the publication of these principles, Eli? Has anything added complexity or nuance to your thinking? Or have you personally ditched any of these and said, I no longer support this principle? I doubt that’s the case, but what’s happened to your thinking on it?
Eli Mitchell-Larson: Well, we’ve gotten some great feedback. And I think one of the pieces that we’ve realized is this point that I just made about really needing to emphasize the importance of nature-based solutions as a means of solving the sort of dual crises of the biodiversity crisis and the climate crisis. I think we’re seeing a couple of things. We’re seeing, in a sense, the principles were quite timely because a lot of entities are claiming to be net zero and they’re not. In other words, they’re still using avoided emission offsets.
We saw a little Twitter storm erupt. I think we’re seeing a rise of people making claims that need to be pushed back against. Whereas we’ve exited the honeymoon phase of net zero commitments, now we’re in a period where we actually have to hold accountable people that are making these claims and make sure that they’re actually aligned with the science and with things like the Oxford Principles and science-based targets guidelines and other forms of guidance. So that’s something we’re seeing. I think we’ve also witnessed a big push by the fossil fuel companies to support nature-based solutions.
But I think this we have to observe with great caution. Because again, I think, We might be playing into their hands if we’re supporting nature-based solutions at the expense of supporting some of the costlier but more secure forms of storage with engineered solutions. I do worry about that, that we’re losing our opportunity to harness the ability to pay of these companies who are profiting from climate change, essentially, who are profiting from fossil fuels, hold them responsible for helping the development and the evolution of these nascent removal technologies.
Yeah, maybe that’s a good segue to share a little bit about some work I’ve been doing and some thinking that we’ve been doing around what does carbon removal really need to get up to speed? Because if you wanted to Do you know? Are you putting that on me? Yeah. We’re trying, man. Come on. Yeah. No. Yeah. So I think we’ve done a, I hope that was a useful overview of the Oxford principles and kind of how they came to be and where they are.
I don’t know if we missed anything there, but yeah, one thing that’s become clear since the Oxford principles were published, one thing that’s certainly clear is that removals need help, right? First of all, organizations like Carbon 180 have done an excellent job. This is an independent advocate in the U.S. who have really become the locus of knowledge and support for carbon removal and really a place for people to go and understand. There’s also something called the CDR Primer, the Carbon Dioxide Removal Primer, which we can put in the show notes, which is an excellent resource.
I’m sure you’ve already talked about that a bit in the podcast. But what we’re realizing is, you know, I’m based at the University of Oxford. And so I’m exposed to kind of what’s happening in Europe, but also a little bit as an American, what’s happening across the pond. And What we’re seeing is that, you know, CDR, carbon dioxide removal, really needs Europe and Europe needs CDR as well. And that is a piece of the puzzle that isn’t really happening. So if you look back at the evolution of solar and wind and some of these other climate solutions, you know, Europe And so I’m actually in the process of helping launch an advocacy organization that will play this role in Europe, that will actually bring the conversation on carbon removal in Europe.
To a healthier place. Because I think right now, there’s a lot of concerns with carbon removal. I think when people hear the word carbon removal, even in the context of the Oxford Principles, when they hear that, oh, wow, we have to switch all our offsets towards removals. I don’t know. What do you think, Ross? I think people hear that word removal and they think of the engineered solutions. They think of direct air capture and these kind of new technologies. When in fact, removal encompasses many, many technologies and pathways, including the nature-based solutions.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Thanks for sharing all of that. I’m so happy to hear about there being more organizations dedicated to thinking about carbon removal. I think it’s specialized enough that it really needs this level of care. And it is strange that there is a lot happening in Europe, but a lot of the discourse I see in Europe, it feels more closely linked to geoengineering debates maybe than exists in the United States. That might just be my perception though. Maybe it’s yours too.
Eli Mitchell-Larson: I think that’s right, that the idea of removals is somewhat fraught and people are concerned that there’s going to be some industrial capture or industries are going to use removals as an excuse to sort of lock in behaviors that we don’t want to perpetuate. And so we know at this point that removal Carbon removal is a means of decolonizing the atmosphere. In other words, It’s a means of holding accountable those entities and countries who put all the carbon in the air in the first place. So I don’t think really anybody should be afraid of carbon removal as a concept because at this point, it’s very clear from the IPCC and other sources that we’re going to need it to achieve our temperature goals.
But there might be some very legitimate fears and concerns. So what we’re trying to do is launch a vehicle, an organization, an NGO that’s, we call it, you know, Carbon 180's little sister, European sister, because what we want to do is three things really. Support policy advocacy, so be an independent, philanthropically funded advocate who can actually 10x the research budget for carbon removal, who can push for that deployment funding I mentioned, deployment incentives that really kind of get these things moving and developing, and also providing fair and safe rules of the road.
Because I think if you’re concerned about carbon removal, if you’re concerned about the idea of direct air capture or geological storage or some of these solutions, The right solution, I would say, is not to fight against them, but to engage with them and say, who should be setting the rules to make sure that they’re done safely? I think it’s really a matter of society acknowledging that we will need to remove carbon and that it’s an important piece of the puzzle, and that the mix of carbon removal pathways that we deploy is really important.
Something we need to decide as a society. But right now, we’re at risk of making that decision based on a lack of knowledge, a sense of fear, and just simple heuristics like, what’s the cheapest thing? So we want to change that. We want to change the narrative. And so that’s why another thing that this organization will do is convene ENGOs, environmental groups, and help to air some of those concerns, start to build a coalition. That’s something that we’ve seen happen in the US. You can really build a coalition around the concept of carbon removal and make sure that it’s done responsibly.
And then third and finally, this idea of funder education. We think there needs to be a place for philanthropists and funders to go to get up to speed with carbon removal and understand how it fits into their strategy and how they can actually support not just fundamental basic research, but also lab exit, right? Getting technologies out of the lab and into the marketplace and supporting all these other forms of advocacy and convening and the things that need to happen to build a thriving ecosystem. So I’ll just close with what the status of this organization is.
We are intending to be very collaborative and complimentary with other efforts that are at play in Europe. So we’re just trying to fill gaps here. We’re not trying to do anything that others are doing. We’ve received some anchor support from the Grantham Foundation, from the Climate Pathfinders Foundation. So we have an initial pool of funding. And so right now, what we’re looking for, what I’d encourage listeners to check out is we have a posting for an executive director. So we’re looking for somebody to lead this organization, to take on this budget that we’ve raised, these partnerships that we’ve formed, but really...
Build an organization that will be a champion for carbon removal. In a way, it’s the face of carbon removal for Europe, something that the US already has in some ways through Noah Deich and other excellent members of the CDR ecosystem, but it doesn’t really exist in Europe yet. So Europe needs CDR, CDR needs Europe, and we’ll put in the show notes a link to cdradvocacyeurope.com where people can check out the ED listing and see if they want to support and get involved.
Ross Kenyon: I think there’s gonna be a lot in the show notes today. So you should definitely check that out if you’re listening. Last I heard, yeah, you were looking for an executive director to lead this new effort. What’s the latest? How’s it been going?
Eli Mitchell-Larson: Absolutely. Yeah, we’ve had some really strong applicants from really all across industry, climate, activists, people that have worked in policy positions. So it’s been really exciting to see, and we’re just going through that process now. But we’re definitely still looking for additional candidates who are interested. And the reality is carbon removal is a relatively new space. And so- The ecosystem doesn’t really exist. And so there aren’t necessarily a lot of people that have deep knowledge of carbon removal and all of these things. So we’re looking farther afield.
We’re definitely looking for people that have built organizations, people who are able to set a vision and be a charismatic leader that can inspire people and who are willing to be Are you guys going to start a podcast? We could cook something up for us. That’d be fun. There’s a lot, right? There’s a lot to talk about.
Ross Kenyon: I think we’re close to 200 episodes deep of this. I don’t feel like I have a final say on anything at this point. The complexity is only increasing. Hopefully not. No, I mean, that’s one of the reasons why it’s not that difficult to keep the show going is because they’re genuinely interesting and difficult problems. And there’s so many angles and I just discover new ones all the time. But specifically for your efforts in Europe, I wish you lots of success. I’m happy to see more people thinking about this.
I love seeing more people enter carbon removal as a career. I love seeing thoughtful people try to make some of these conversations happen. I think it’s really important. I get kind of discouraged sometimes of the timbre of the conversation gets a little too I like that there’s an attempt to elevate it. But anyways, not to go back to that familiar territory that for as much as I talk about not wanting to do it, I have meta comments on it all the time. I should stop doing that.
Anyways, though, links to all of those things are in the show notes. Eli, if someone wanted to follow your work personally, where’s the best place for them to do so?
Eli Mitchell-Larson: Yeah, thanks Ross. Well, first of all, encourage anyone to check out the Oxford Principles for Net Zero Aligned Carbon Offsetting and actually another paper that we’re about to put out that I’d love to also share in the show notes where we actually show a vision for how you can operationalize those principles, how you can actually I’m at Eli M. Larson on Twitter. You can check me out there. And yeah, I’d be keen to hear from anyone. So we’ll include some ways to reach me in the show notes.
And I really look forward to continuing these conversations.
Ross Kenyon: Me too. Happy to have you back sometime to talk about future papers and research, et cetera. There’s clearly a lot here. I left a lot of comments of yours go by without responding, even though I wanted to. I don’t know if you knew that, Eli. I was like, oh, no. That comment had four or five noteworthy things. I hope I didn’t monologue through them. So I’d love to hear them. It wasn’t a factor of the way in which you speak so much as the content is important and there’s a lot to say about all of it.
Anyways, that’s a good sign. There’s more to talk about and we’ll have to do more in the future. But in the meantime, thank you so much for coming on the show. It was a lot of fun and I’m grateful for having you here. Thank you, Ross. My pleasure. Thank you. And thank you for listening too. If you like what we’re doing here, please rate and review us on iTunes or Apple Podcasts. Tell your friends. Have a nuanced discussion about offsetting and carbon markets.
Try and bring that and shoehorn that into your weekend. I’m sure your friends will love it. Hopefully you have friends who will love it. Whatever. Okay. Thanks for listening and goodbye for now. Well, thank you so much for listening. If you like the show, please rate and review it in Apple Podcasts and or Stitcher. It really helps us a lot to get this content to a wider audience. If you think what we’re doing is useful, interesting, fun, hopefully all three, we’d certainly appreciate your rating and review.
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